Favourite Ward | District 8 | fin

FAVOURITE WARD | 18 YEARS OLD | DISTRICT EIGHT


"Give me something I can hold
That I can trust and call my own
And won’t run out and leave me cold…”

You are wearing the ribbons he bought you, bright and silky in your thick black hair, when he leans down to kiss you for the final time. He murmurs in your ear how sorry he is to let you go. But he’s eighteen now, he tells you, not a schoolboy any longer; his father says it’s time for him to get serious if he’s going to take over the factory someday. He will never forget you, he says, but he can’t keep running around with a girl from the community home, no matter – he brushes his thumb over the knuckles of your slender hand, so tenderly – no matter how breathtaking she is. You understand, he tells you.

And he’s right. You do understand. You might understand even better than he does.

You are fifteen at the time, but you look older.

When you are sixteen you begin seeing the boy whose parents own the little jewelry shop near the square – the one with the display window you and your friends like to stand and stare through until the Peacekeepers start giving you unfriendly looks. This boy gives you a present, a necklace, for your one-month anniversary. It is the most beautiful thing you have ever owned. You wear it proudly to school every day, and on your walk back to the community home every afternoon you make a detour to stash it safely in a hollow tree, one of your oldest hiding-places for treasures you don’t want to lose. This lasts six days; on the morning of the seventh you go to meet your boy in front of his house and meet his parents instead. Your treasure glints brightly above the neckline of your dress. There is shouting, accusation and denial, and finally they call for their son to come outside. He doesn’t say a word until they’ve asked their question three times, and then, shuffling his feet and avoiding your eyes, he tells them the answer is no.

“But you did,” you say helplessly. “You gave it to me.”

He says nothing more. His parents glance between you, two red-faced teenagers who both look on the verge of tears, and then, with a sigh, his father holds out his hand. “Just give us back the necklace,” he says to you, “and we won’t involve the Peacekeepers.”

After that, you and the boy both turn away your faces when you pass in the halls at school.

When you are sixteen-and-a-half you go out with a boy who means to be a Peacekeeper. Two of your friends catch the eye of two of his, and the six of you go to dinners and dances, bars you’re too young for and shops you’d never enter on your own. These boys aren’t rich, but they’re richer than you, and they’re generous. You have more fun with them than you think you’ve ever had before, and you eat well; your cheeks grow less hollow.

The boys send off their applications to the Peacekeeper Academy in District Two. All three of them are accepted, and the six of you entertain yourselves for a while in sorrowing over your imminent parting. Your boy writes you a poem on patterned paper; one of your friends is given a silver bracelet, and you interrogate her boy until you’re satisfied that he didn’t steal it for her. The other friend gets nothing but kisses, and back at the community home she laments her ill fortune to the two of you until the night warden shouts at you all to go to sleep. You don’t think a poem compares to a silver bracelet, but you make sympathetic noises and add none of your own complaints. You don’t want to single out your fortunate friend; it’s not her fault she was the only one of you to be given anything valuable.

It’s a nice poem, anyway. You keep it rolled up in a box under your bed, tied round with an old hair-ribbon.

You are seventeen-and-a-half when the boys depart for the Academy. The three of you farewell them tearfully, receiving lingering kisses and promises to write. Your boy is the only one who keeps his word. You fill up the backs of his letters with your replies, saving up to buy new stamps for the envelopes they arrived in, sealing them shut with tape from school. One of the other community home girls has gotten hold of some bright red lipstick, and you negotiate for the right to stamp kisses like wax seals on each envelope before you mail them off.

It is lovely while it lasts; your friends are jealous, and you glow. Sometimes he sends you candies, tucked into the envelopes along with his letters. When they’re big enough, you break them into pieces and give a fragment to everyone in your dormitory. For a while you are very popular indeed.

But the letters grow less and less frequent as the months go by. The last you receive comes a month before your eighteenth birthday; you are anxious and busy, putting in applications at shops and factories and searching for housing cheap enough that you can pay the first month with your meager savings, and the reply you write him is neither terribly long nor terribly romantic. Perhaps that is why he does not answer it; perhaps it is because you forget to leave a lipstick kiss on the front of the envelope. But you’ve had a feeling for a while now that this was coming, and anyhow you don’t have time to waste on being sad. You ask now and again at the post office whether anything has come for you, and otherwise you dedicate yourself to the business of survival.

It’s only a week until your birthday when you finally hear back from a job. It’s a factory position, one of those huge old fabric mills that never bother to modernize their safety equipment, but it pays, and that’s all you have the luxury to care about. You make arrangements for lodging with a family that hosts several of the factory girls, and pack your clothes and your treasures as neatly as you can in the big garbage bag the community home gives you to use for the move. When your birthday morning comes, you’re gone before they have the chance to tell you to get out.

The days pass. You settle into your new lodgings, get to know the girls with whom you share your attic room. You grow accustomed to your work at the factory. A couple of months into your adult life, you meet a Peacekeeper, new to the district, who takes a fancy to you. He takes you out drinking on his dime, buys you a dress to replace one that’s worn threadbare; he tells you stories of growing up in District Two, of training for the Games, of what he claims to be his own decision not to enter them. He is neither as kind nor as generous as was your Peacekeeper-to-be, but he is what you have, so you keep smiling for him. The money you did not spend to replace your dress goes half toward an outing with some of your friends from the community home, half toward a bottle of medicine your feverish roommate could not afford without help.

One day, during your shift at work, the owner’s son makes the journey from the offices to see the looms and their attendants that keep his family rich. He walks the factory floor, looking stern and professional with his hands folded behind his back. When he passes near you, your eyes widen and your hand goes to your hair, fingers brushing the faded silk ribbon that binds it out of reach of the machines.

His gaze sweeps over you without recognition.